The following journal entry is written by Tolly. He had a bit of a temper tantrum… After he finished writing this, he was ashamed of what he wrote, but I encouraged him to post it on the website anyway. As childish as he comes across, he has a point, and he’s honest. He’s always honest when it counts.
Today we’re going to make lots of croquettes to cheer him up. Everyone else has been stressing him for… I guess years now, ha.
—Ansel
Removed from social media, I find that I no longer have the urge to “report” every trifle of significance that happens to me. I exercise regularly, my new clothes arrived yesterday, I made mashed potatoes with my homemade berbere (Ethiopian spice mixture) that Ansel loves so much. All of these things are—and it may seem silly to you—very important to me. That I do cartwheels at work on my lunchbreak? This is a matter of life and death to me. I did not survive this long, did not suffer growth spurts childhood and adolescence, just to become an adult that cannot and will not do cartwheels. I do not understand the adults who do not seize at every opportunity to enjoy the visceral joy of their power… No, they wither away, become more and more faded, brittle, dead and dying slowly. But that is for another time.
Life is important to me. Yet I speak less and less of it. Is it because I am less interested in it? No; it is simply because I’ve removed the most accessible avenue for me to express my joy in it, and what a fruitless avenue that was. Twitter, Facebook, also Mastodon.
People are important to me. Yet I speak to fewer and fewer of them. Is it because of the pandemic? Well, yes, partially. Is it because I am less interested in them? Yes—and No—because I am not interested in the little and large craps of life that they seem to be littered with, litter around me. Engage with the real people, the real society around you—it seems like a noble and correct thing to do, but in pursuit of this ideal you lose sight, ironically, of how corrupt and degraded, corrupting and degrading real people, real society are. I don’t care for the idiots—I don’t care for the petty squabbles and arguments about what is “correct” sex and sexuality and what men and women and all aren’t doing correctly. I don’t care for what TV shows people watch… refuse to watch… because of this or that scandal, this or that actor.
I want more from life and these people can give me absolutely nothing in that regard. Only stress. Only fear of persecution, either of myself or my loved ones.
And it is the same when I pursue something that is of intellectual interest of me. You know, I joined a Discord server not too long ago, all about palaeontology and biology and natural history. A stupid person—probably a teenager—it’s always a stupid teenager—raised the question of “views on child labour” then proceeded to message me screenshots of the most reactionary and degenerate “views”. Did I ask for this? Did anyone? No. And every community seems to be infested with this sort of stupidity… Of depressives who’ve never once thought about the suffering of others (widows) and proceed to wail about their own nihilism, and of general idiots trying to make jokes about how it’s “cool” not to like anime.
The more I interact with people the more I hate them. For their mediocrity, for their senselessness. And I don’t mean by that “delicacy”, I mean a real dullness of the senses and of thought, of the lack of any sort of activity in the brain. There is no thirst or hunger for life. No searching. No imagination or thought in these beings that I am ashamed to call “human”. Even a cow finds joy, you know, in rolling around in the grass… And these people do nothing. They walk around in the grass in shoes.
I will not raise my own level by surrounding myself with idiots who bring me down to their level. That is why I’ve turned myself inward… Because no one on the outside seems to actually care about the world! Hmph.